A couple of weeks ago, my longtime friend and collaborator Katherine Gibson presented the 2017 Wheelright Memorial Lecture, “Manufacturing the Future: Cultures of Production for the Anthropocene.”

her work has consistently challenged orthodox and heterodox economics’ primary focus upon the operation of ‘Big-C’ Capitalism. Instead, Gibson has crafted a unique methodological framework she terms ‘participatory action research’, which looks to the diversity of existing community economic arrangements by engaging directly with local subjects.

The method engages with local communities to shed light upon the idiosyncrasies and often non-commercial nature of local modes of provisioning. Rather than accepting the ‘tragedy of the commons’ – the notion of the inevitable degradation of commonly used land and resources – Gibson’s work has revealed the importance of the commons to many existing developmentally diverse communities. She thereby challenges the core tenet of orthodox economics, which prioritises the optimisation of the allocation of scarce resources through facilitating smoothly functioning markets.

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Scenes from my talk last night, “Utopia and the Critique of Political Economy,” sponsored by the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney in a lecture series to honor Ted Wheelwright (1921-2007).

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According to UNICEF, the latest crisis of capitalism has hit 15-24 year olds especially hard, with the number of young people who are not participating in education, employment, or training rising dramatically in many countries. In the European Union 7.5 million young people (almost equal to the population of Switzerland) were classified as NEET in 2013—nearly a million more than in 2008.

The largest absolute increases were in Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Romania, all with relative changes of around 30 per cent or higher.

Of the OECD countries that are not in the European Union, the United States saw the largest increase in the NEET rate (from 12 to 15 percent), followed by Australia (9.9 to 12.2 percent).

As the authors of the UNICEF report explain,

Unemployment among adolescents and young adults is a significant long-term effect of the recession. Among those aged 15–24, unemployment has increased in 34 of the 41 countries analysed. Youth unemployment and underemployment have reached worrying levels in many countries.

Even when unemployment or inactivity decreases, that does not necessarily mean that young people are finding stable, reasonably paid jobs. The number of 15- to 24-year-olds in part-time work or who are underemployed has tripled on average in countries more exposed to the recession. Contract work has become more common, contributing to the general precariousness of labour markets.

These young people, because of the conditions of unemployment and precarious employment that have been imposed on them, constitute a lost generation